Do You Own Your Social Media Identity?

According to the Wall Street JournalTwitter is now mainstream. Whether or not you buy that, it can mean only one thing: the cybersquatters are about to move in en masse. So the question is, who owns your Twitter name?

I finally jumped on the bandwagon and got mine (@catone) sometime last March. SitePoint wasn’t quite so lucky. When we went to register our official Twitter account, we were unfortunately too late to get the obvious choice: someone else already had it. (We can be found on Twitter at @sitepointdotcom and would love for you to follow us!)

Perhaps the most cheeky example of Twitter squatting, is the @glennbeck account, which has a single tweet that appears to be fishing for money for the account. Clearly, the account isn’t being controlled by television and radio personality Glenn Beck, but rather by an opportunistic squatter attempting to make a quick buck.

To be fair to the person who has the SitePoint name we initially went after, it’s not a pure case of squatting — he actually owns a trademark on the name SitePoint in Switzerland. For that reason, Twitter couldn’t help us — even though SitePoint Pty. Ltd. owns the US trademark to the name SitePoint.

The takeaway is clear here, though:

You should immediately register your company name on every social media service you can think of.

Twitter, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube — these are the new frontier of cybersquatting. “How to protect your own brand? Immediately […] determine if your name is available. Get it while you can,” writes Steinnon. “While you are at it, reserve all of the names associated with your brand. You may decide that any domain you have invested in should have its [own social media] ID. It is the domain name squatters who will jump on this new land grab first after all.”

Before joining Jilt, Josh Catone was the Executive Director of Editorial Projects at Mashable, the Lead Writer at ReadWriteWeb, Lead Blogger at SitePoint, and the Community Evangelist at DandyID. On the side, Josh enjoys managing his blog The Fluffington Post.